Pain Across the Pond: Measuring Penal Severity (Inter)subjectively in Europe and North America

• In Event: Global Sentencing Practices

Abstract

US penal philosophy has been the site of a major confrontation between penal objectivists (who view punishment as the imposition of judicially and democratically determined liberty deprivations) and subjectivists (who view punishment as the experience of suffering and other unpleasantness). Penal objectivists defend the Global Western status quo, but there are compelling epistemological, moral, and political reasons to resist a purely objective account of penal severity, in both sentencing and penal policy. However, pure penal subjectivism is also both conceptually and ethically unsatisfying as a penal metric.

Meanwhile, across the Atlantic, European penology has taken up Gresham M Sykes’ famous notion of the ‘pains of imprisonment’ and applied it across a variety of custodial and non-custodial sentencing options. This has generally been in the service of a rehabilitative and managerial academic orthodoxy, however, and lacks focus on how the pains of punishment can be used to measure penal severity more generally.

This paper argues that there are compelling reasons to bridge these two fields, exploring the literature in Europe and in North America, developing an account of ‘intersubjective’ penal severity and arguing for the necessity of transatlantic research collaboration on the subject.

Author

• David John Hayes, The University of Sheffield